It’s All In The Planning!

Dear reader,
Thank you for visiting this blog on the WordPress server.
For the past year, I had been penning my thoughts here but effective mid-July, I have moved my blog to its new home at ssquah.activeknights.org
Please click here to take you to the new home of It’s All In The Planning!
Regards
Quah, Seng-Sun
Penang, Malaysia

The Malaysian chess scene was poorer on 16 May 2007 with the passing of Dr Foo Lum Choon.
Junior chess players will not know who he was but older chess players will recognise Dr Foo as a pioneer among Malaysian chess players and organisers.
Dr Foo was 90 years old, long retired as a medical practitioner, when [...]

I’ve long wondered how it would be like to wake up one Monday morning and know that I don’t have to flex my mental muscles for any more chess column. Well, there are two words to describe this feeling: restless and frustrated.
Yes, I feel restless because I still have this pent-up energy in me and [...]

By my estimate, between August 1980 and today, I must have written slightly over a thousand chess columns for The Star. Given that on an average, a single column of mine would contain about 1,000 to 1,200 words, this scribe may have contributed perhaps about a million words here.
It’s a mean feat, isn’t it? An [...]

LAST weekend was unusually busy for me. I had hoped to spend my time in quiet enjoyment over a few games of chess at the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) team tournament but some last-minute developments dictated otherwise.
So, if you can permit me this week, I will just ramble along to share a few thoughts that [...]

WHEN I wrote three weeks ago on the challenges that local chess coaches will face from organisations that are able to bring in qualified foreign coaches, I was prepared for criticism.
Sure enough, some of the local coaches were outraged. One said the capabilities of local coaches were not any less than those of foreign [...]

FRANÇOIS de la Rochefoucauld, a 17th century French classical author, once remarked that the only constant in life is change. That applies to chess, too.
It has evolved from a simple game enjoyed by the kings of India and Persia to the complex and demanding version that is played today throughout the world.
Likewise in chess coaching, [...]

FRIENDLY games? Are you serious? Halfway through the first round of the Malaysia-Singapore chess match in Kuala Lumpur two weeks ago, someone mentioned to me casually that we should not be taking the results of the match too seriously.
I could see what he meant. This wasn’t supposed to be a real serious match. In his [...]

It is crunch time this weekend at the Cititel MidValley in Kuala Lumpur. Tomorrow, we shall be having the valiant fighters from the Malaysian Chess Federation (MCF) facing the might of the Singapore Chess Federation (SCF) at the annual Malaysia-Singapore chess match. This year, we are the hosts.
The Singaporeans have been winning by big margins [...]

I WAS so very much on edge last Friday evening. Who wouldn’t be, watching the four tie-break games of the world chess championship unification match live on the Internet?
That was just about the most tense final night in any chess competition. Bulgarian grandmaster Vesselin Topalov, the Fide world champion, was battling the popularly-styled [...]

I HAVE been in the thick of this country’s chess movement since the early 1970s and yet when it comes to understanding the mind of local chess players, I am still perplexed.
For instance, I have been hearing and reading comments from various people asking how we can improve the level of chess in this country.
To [...]

My daily activities of the past three days have been interspersed with brief periods of quiet reflection.
You see, on Thursday, a good friend of the family had dropped by to my house just to inform my wife and I that the Buddhist Chief High Priest of Malaysia and Singapore had passed away earlier in the [...]

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Have you heard of Omar Khayyam? He lived about 900 years ago and he wrote the above verse.
Those were the days when Persia was at [...]

(My article on Datuk Tan Chin Nam first appeared in The Star newspaper on 17 Mar 2006, the eve of his 80th birthday. An updated version of this article will appear in the souvenir programme of this year’s third edition of the Arthur Tan Memorial Malaysia Open Chess Championship at the Cititel Hotel, MidValley Megamall, [...]